Chapter Six False Confessions

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Addressing question 5 of chapter six false confessions. Innocent suspects confess to crimes they did not commit often because they are terrified, confused and exhausted from interrogations. There are multiple reasons why someone might make a false confession. They could confess because they are deceived or tricked by the police or because they might not understand what they are doing and the consequences of it. Also an individual might confess to a crime they did not commit because they feel hopeless, helpless and isolated. The final reason people often confess to crimes they did not commit was to cover for another individual. According to the Innocence Project, false confessions played a role in nearly 30% of all wrongful convictions that …show more content…

Utah, 110 U.S. 574, 584 (1884). According to Kassin and Wrightsman (1985) there are three types of false confessions: a coerced false confession, a voluntary false confession, and an internalized false confession. I am going to give case examples for each of the following types of false confessions. As mentioned by Redlich and Goodman (2003) there was a case in 1998 where two young boys the ages of 7 and 8 years old admitted to the murdering of an 11-year-old girl after being offered McDonald’s Happy Meals. The juveniles were interrogated without lawyers or their parents present. This was just one very clear example of a coerced false confession. A more serious and controversial example is the 1989 case of the Dixmoor Five where a woman was raped and nearly murdered while jogging through Central Park. Five teenage african american and hispanic boys were brought in a for investigation. All five teenagers confessed to the crime after a combination of 30 hours of interrogations. It was found that they had all falsely confessed after 13 years later Mathias Reyes admitted to the rape where DNA analysis confirmed it. So why did all five teens falsely confess to such a horrific consequential crime? It was because during the interrogations they all had become so stressed and so broken down by the very aggressive and influential interrogations. They began to feel hopeless and they believed that confessing the was in their best interest even when they knew they were innocent (Nesterak,

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